Bears News: Baseball was more entertaining and attractive in 2023 |
The 2023 baseball season has ended, and what an exciting season it was. The postseason was wildly entertaining, and the Texas Rangers won their first World Series in their franchise history in a thrilling series over the surprising representatives of the NL: Arizona Diamondbacks.
Before the season, MLB made multiple massive rule changes to improve the sport’s pace of play and increase fan engagement. Not only did they keep a few rules from the past (expanded playoffs to six per league), but they made the extra-inning runner on second base permanent and kept the universal DH. However, a pitch clock was implemented to speed up the pace of play, bases increased in size to encourage an increase in stolen bases and avoid some injuries, and the defensive shift was banned to encourage balls-in-play and bring more action to the game. The results were evident in the inaugural year, and there are a few numbers to determine that: attendance, ratings, batting average, stolen bases, and game time. According to the rules, attendance, ratings, batting average, and stolen bases should go up, and the game time should go down. Many different sources and publications have reported on the numbers and compared them to past seasons. Still, our information is coming from Forbes to keep our sources consistent. Attendance was one of the most impressive aspects that the new rules have presented a change in. Attendance was up nearly 10% from last season and was the most attended season since 2017. An MLB record 17 teams had more than 2.5 million fans come to their games this season, plus 86% of teams saw their attendance increase from just 2022 to this season. TV ratings are the other side of that coin. If the attendance in the park is going up, you would certainly think that more people were watching games at home. However, ratings were a different story. While TBS, ESPN, FOX, and FS1 saw ratings increase around 10%. The reason many expect that these numbers were not more significant is because a large percentage of large market teams and teams with huge fanbases had disappointing seasons. Not including the Los Angeles Dodgers, but the Los Angeles Angels, New York Mets, New York Yankees, Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, Boston Red Sox, San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals all missed the playoffs. That contributed to untraditionally low TV ratings for the MLB All-Star game and the postseason, plus the World Series. As for the on-field numbers. The batting average across MLB increased from .243 to .2048, and the average number of runs jumped to 9.2 per game. Stolen bases, of course, saw a massive increase. There were more steals and more attempts per game. There were more steals this season than any year since 1997, and 3,503 steals in 2023 — over 1,000 more than in 2022 (2,486). As expected, the success rate was higher than ever due to the larger bases. Finally, the easiest number to notice is the decrease in the time of the game. The average game in 2023 was 2 hours and 39 minutes long, a 24-minute reduction from 2022 — the lowest since 1984 when the games averaged 2 hours and 35 minutes, and the first time since 2015 below an average of 3 hours. Plus, MLB avoided the games that lasted more than three and a half hours, as there were only nine this season — compared to almost 400 in 2021. The product on the field was more entertaining and more attractive than in years past — and the numbers prove it. It is safe to say MLB was effective in its efforts, and we can only expect to see those numbers grow in the right direction in the years to come.
